How To Resize Images Why Do I Need To?
Digital media has become so main-stay that the average phone can take pictures in excess of 3mb, and cameras can take in excess of 10mb images now. Desktop applications like Photoshop, Fireworks & GIMP can create unlimited size images (depending on the dimensions and the numbers of layers).
Sites that will allow you to upload an avatar or an image – like blogs, forums, and media featured sites – often have a size restraint, and it leave some people not knowing how to get their favorite image uploaded to the site.
The basic premise is that the image has a weight, measured in megabytes – before this goes south and someone falls asleep, it’s basically just comprised of how many colors, how big, and how technical the image is.
because of the number of factors, it’s usually easier to just utilize an upload/resizing service that will do the job for you. Some of these services will allow you to decide up front how big/how much file weight you want to have the image ‘shaved down to’. Some just use verbiage like “small”, “smaller”, etc…
Some social network sites, will even scale the image down for you now – but even then, it has to be below a certain size.
Here are some of the more “user-friendly” online resizing tools that I’ve found:
Like most services on the internet, these are free (for now). Also, most of these services will do one thing/feature that the other will not do. ResizeToMail gives you the option to skew images down to specific scale size (width vs height), while another allows for zoom and crop (which are nice if you want to cut out a bad background)
Please reply with any experiences you have at any of these sites, and likewise, let us know if you have another site you could recommend.
The Google App Engine (GAE) No Non Sense Quick Start Guide
Follow these quick steps to deploy a website or web-application in Google App Engine:
Follow the steps to deploy a website or web-application in Google App Engine:
1) Create a account in Google AppEngine:
a) Go to http://appengine.google.com and sign in (with a Google/Gmail account) to the service. When you sign in, you will create a project too. This project have a app-id ( a identifier, please anote it ).
2) Download the latest version of AppEngine SDK:
a) Go to http://code.google.com/appengine/downloads.html and download the latest version of AppEngine SDK for Python for your Operation System. b) Extract the compacted file in your home folder for example. This will create a folder called “google_appengine”. This folder contains all necessary files to develop, debug and deploy your app in GAE.
3) Download the skeleton app ‘webpy-gallery’ and alter the app.yaml file:
a) In the google_appengine folder get the webpy-gallery app. This app contains a basic skeleton of a web.py app to run in GAE.
svn checkout http://webpy-gallery.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ webpy-gallery
Now in the google_appengine folder you have a sub-folder called webpy-gallery and in this sub-folder you have a file called app.yaml. This file is a deployment descriptor where you can configure ‘what’ and ‘how’ deploy in GAE. Then as a first step, alter the application property for the id of the application that you have created in STEP 1.
4) Run the application in dev mode:
a) To test your app, open a shell (bash) and go to google_appengine folder and type; python dev_appserver.py webpy-gallery This will start the ‘development webserver’ in the address http://localhost:8008 then you can access this address in the browser.
5) Deploy your application in GAE:
For deploy your app in GAE just run the command:
python appcfc.py update webpy-gallery
6) Last tip:
- Ever that you alterate a html file, you need compile this file before update your app, the go to the webpy-gallery folder and execute the shell script compile_template.sh
Special Thanks to Leandro of ProfessionalIT for his extensive research & sharing his quickstart for the GAE.
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